The present disclosure relates to the field of electronic devices, and specifically to computational electronic devices such as servers. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to inventorying components within a server by a management controller or similar device.
A baseboard management controller (BMC) can inventory the electronic components within a server to determine the configuration of the server. However, a BMC relies on identification messages from the components, which are produced electronically. Therefore, the BMC is unable to inventory passive (i.e., non-electronic) components such as heat sinks, baffles and non-electrically identifiable cables.
This is particularly a problem when the wrong heatsink is installed on a processor or if a baffle is missing. This is also a problem if the wrong internal power cable is installed for high power general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU) and similar devices that require extra power. The normal manufacturing test is not run long enough for a failure to determine the server was built incorrectly.